by Erica L. Meltzer | May 3, 2018 | AP, Blog
A while back, I happened to find myself discussing the AP® craze with a colleague who teaches AP classes, and at one point, she mentioned offhandedly that with the push toward data collection and continual assessment, schools are increasingly eliminating the type of cumulative final exams that used to be standard in favor of frequent small-scale quizzes and tests that can be easily plotted for administrators’ consumption.
I poked around and discovered that some schools have also eliminated cumulative mid-term or final exams because such assessments are insufficiently “authentic” (read: not fun) or because of concerns about stress, or because so much time is already devoted to state tests.
I wasn’t really aware of that shift when I was tutoring various SAT II and AP exams, but it explained some of what I encountered: students had been exposed to key concepts, but they hadn’t been given sufficient practice for those concepts to really sink in. They were learning only what they needed to know for a particular quiz or test and then promptly forgetting the material.
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by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 21, 2018 | Blog, College Admissions
As discussed in my previous post, application inflation seems to be hitting ever greater heights. With the online Common App allowing students to apply to 15+ schools at the click of a button, it can be hard for applicants to gauge their real chances at a particular school: there’s no way to know just how many of those 40,000 applicants are serious contenders. With so many competing for so few slots, sometimes getting rejected isn’t a matter of doing anything in particular wrong. It’s just “great kid, but only if room” – which, of course, there isn’t.
That said, there are still some specific, common reasons for why the college application process can produce less than stellar results. So if you want to know what NOT to do, I offer you the following list of 10 ways to get rejected from college. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 19, 2018 | Blog
Every year around this time, posts inevitably appear on College Confidential that go something like this:
I applied to every Ivy, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Nebraska, and I got rejected everywhere except my safety school. I have a 4.5 GPA, 35 ACT, and good activities. wasn’t sure about HYPSM, but I thought I was totally set for Northwestern and Hopkins. What do I do???? Help!!!!
This year, there’s a whole long thread on the Parents Forum entitled “Why applicants overreach and are disappointed in April,” and I would strongly encourage anyone just beginning the college search to read through it, before the madness sets in and you fall in love (or your child falls in love) with a school that accepts only 5% of its applicants.
That is, 5% overall — the RD admission rate might in reality be closer to 2%. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 15, 2018 | Blog
The Critical Reader: AP® English Language and Composition Edition is now available for purchase on Amazon. The book is carefully aligned with the revised (post-2014) version of the AP Lang/Comp exam provides a comprehensive review of all the reading and writing skills tested.
Includes:
- A complete chapter dedicated to each type of multiple-choice reading question and essay type.
- Numerous multiple-choice practice questions covering literal comprehension, purpose, tone/attitude, rhetorical strategies, and footnotes.
- Common essay pitfalls, with detailed examples of what to do and what not to do.
- Sample student essays with in-depth scoring analyses.
I’ve also posted a preview so that you can see for yourself.
Now, a couple of notes: (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 24, 2018 | Blog, College Admissions, SAT Essay
Harvard University has announced that it will be dropping the SAT/ACT Essay requirement, beginning with the class of 2023. Along with Princeton, Yale, and Stanford, Harvard was one of the last holdouts to require that students submit this component.
I wrote a series of critiques of the redesigned essay when the new test was first rolled out, and I still believe that it is deeply problematic – I think colleges are justified in viewing it with suspicion. At the same time, however, I believe that there are very compelling reasons for schools to continue requiring some sort of writing sample completed under proctored conditions.
Although some of my initial concerns about the SAT essay were unfounded, the principal issue remains that it is fundamentally a nonsense assignment, one presented in muddled language that says one thing and means something else. It asks students to analyze how an author uses “evidence” to build an argument, but seeks to remove outside knowledge from the equation. In reality, this is an absurd proposition: any even slightly substantive analysis of “evidence” is impossible without actual knowledge of a topic. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Feb 3, 2018 | Blog, GMAT
If you look at many lists of GMAT® idioms, you’ll likely find dozens upon dozens of preposition-based constructions, e.g. insist on, characteristic of, correlate with. Although the GMAT does sometimes test these types of idioms, it is important to understand that they are not the primary focus of the test. Because of an increase in the number of international students taking the exam, the GMAC has elected to shift the focus away from idiomatic American usage and toward more issues involving overall sentence logic.
That said, there are still a handful of fixed constructions that the GMAT does regularly test. Many, but not all, of these fall into the category of word pairs (aka correlative conjunctions). Particularly if you are not a native English speaker, you are best served by focusing on these constructions, which stand a high chance of appearing, as opposed to memorizing dozens of preposition-based idioms that have only a minuscule chance of being tested on any given exam. (more…)
